Our soul is the vessel in which we journey through all levels of experience. Our soul is also inherent with divine qualities of compassion, curiosity, clarity, timeless presence, and love. The practice of deep inquiry helps us differentiate among these qualities and transforms our history into an understanding of our personal destiny, responsibility, and fuller participation in life.

How does our True Nature move through the various dimensions of our Being—body, personality, and the soul? By opening a space of curiosity and developing the skills of deep inquiry, we discover how the force of True Nature moves through our lives to optimize our development. By sensing and inquiring into the immediate arising of our consciousness, even blocks, distortions, traumas, and fears become doorways into where our soul is and how it wishes to develop.

Alzak Amlani, PhD, is a professor in the Integral Counseling Psychology department at California Institute of Integral Studies. He has been a practicing psychologist in San Francisco and Palo Alto since 1995. His areas of interest and expertise include humanistic-existential perspectives, intuition and alternate ways of knowing, diversity work, yoga philosophy, and Jungian psychology-particularly the work of his friend and mentor Robert A. Johnson.

Alzak was born in Uganda, East Africa of parents from Gujarat, India. He grew up speaking Gujarati, Swahili and English. In 1972 his family fled the country as refugees and arrived in Los Angeles, where he studied Spanish for four years, leading to travel in Latin America and working with migrant children in Santa Cruz County. Alzak's cultural background and work as a psychologist led to invitations to give talks on both honoring and shifting your culture at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Stanford University, Notre Dame, and the Aga Khan Foundation. He writes a monthly column on these topics for India Currents Magazine, called "Dear Doctor."